Tips on Moving an Elderly Parent

“How would you like to move to Florida?” I ask my 93-year-old mother over the phone. Again. Mom has dementia, and lives in a memory care center in Los Angeles.

“And be closer to you?” she asks. “I would like that, but I have to check with the family.”

That’s Mom. Family first. Problem is she forgets she doesn’t have much family left there.

“Well you think about it,” I say, but the moving machine was in motion.

In fact, as you read this, if all has gone according to plan, God willing and the creek don’t rise, I will have packed up Mom, rolled her and her oxygen equipment via wheelchair onto a one-way flight to Orlando, and transported her into her new home, an assisted living facility with memory care near me.

Then I will sit down on a curb somewhere and have a stiff drink.

This milestone will cap a plan born two months ago when I visited Mom in the care center where she’s spent (I can’t really say “lived”) the last three years. That day I left her with a kiss and a promise: I would be back as soon as I could.